Conducted in 1999, this interview covers all of the central themes of Trudell’s ideas, from the necessity of individuals and nations to take responsibility for their actions, to the importance of finding spirituality in one’s life, and onward, with comments on the potential dangers of plastic medicine men, his thoughts on women, the source of his creative energy and more.
Ben Corbett: If there’s a continuous theme running through your album Blue Indians what would you say that is?
John Trudell: That the technologic civilized world is an industrial reservation.
Can you explain this?
Yeah, well I mean it IS an industrial reservation. Because you look at it, you know, and there’s basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That’s what the governments do, that’s what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.
So that means the world has become colonized and turned into a reservation.
That’s what it means to me. Under this theory, everybody’s an Indian. In reality, that was a name they gave to a people 500 years ago so they could steal their lives away from them and their rightful place in this reality. So now you come to here, where it’s at now, that’s what’s happening to the citizens of the industrial world. They call themselves citizens and identify by whatever religion or political party or whatever, but in reality, there are more Indians now.
Does that link white people with Indians? Is that a common thread that we can work on together?
I think it’s a common thread. You know, I don’t know how the white people and the Indians think about it, generally speaking. But for me personally, I think it’s a common thread. I think we have many common threads, but we’ve been programmed racially not to look at the common threads. You get right down to the reality of it, what are white people? White people are the descendants of tribes also. They come from tribes. It’s just that the erasing of their tribal memory started 3,000 years ago. For us it started 500 years ago. When you look at what I call the Caucasian Americans, when they got here and the brutality that they carried out here was the only reality they knew, because that same brutality had been carried out on them.
And this goes back to Greek times and Europe?
That’s exactly right. See, we’ve always had more in common than we really understood. But this doesn’t minimize or make go away the genocide that was committed here. Culturally, in a spiritual sense, they’re responsible for that genocide. But in a conscious, logical sense, they’re responsible but they’re not because they didn’t know what they were doing.
Do you think this is associated with some kind of genetic guilt through the centuries?
No I don’t think it’s a genetic guilt. I think it’s a programmed genetic disconnection from spiritual reality.
You talk a lot about reality and its definition…
Well reality’s an interesting thing. I think we live in a spiritual reality. I think we are matter, or physical things, in a spiritual reality, and within that spiritual reality there are many, many realities. For every individual that lives on the earth, they have their own perception of reality. To keep it what makes it coherent to me, we live in a spiritual reality, and within that spiritual reality our purpose in life is to maintain a balance and to take care of the future. The only way we can take care of the future is by taking care of the past. And we take care of the past by how we take care of today.
And that means taking responsibility?
That’s exactly right. That spiritual reality is based upon responsibility. Religious realities are not spiritual. The religious reality that exists in these technolgic industrial perceptions are not about responsibility, they’re about authoritarianism and guilt and sin and blame, domination and submission. They’re not about responsibility. Look at the situation and condition that the world is in and you can tell that they’re not about responsibility. They accumulate wealth, they create their own authoritarian systems, they use their authoritarian systems and accumulated wealth to influence economic and political decisions that get made. They use their resources, they use their authority and accumulated wealth to influence military decisions that get made. Every behavior they have is really and truly not about responsibility.
In other words, by being authoritarian, what you do is you take the responsibility away from the people and then the people feel there’s no need to take responsibility because somebody else is doing it for them?
Well they feel disconnected. They don’t really know what the meaning of responsibility is.
Do you think that’s one of the biggest challenges facing the human race?
Yeah, actually I do. It may be the biggest one. Becoming reconnected to reality.
What would be a way for somebody to do that? I guess it comes right down to the individual.
For an individual to take responsibility – because the individual leads to the collective – I think we should always tell ourselves the truth. We should never lie to ourselves. Some of the most dangerous lies are the lies of rationalization and justification. We should always tell ourselves the truth. We should always be real with ourselves, even if our truths are glorious or shameful. Even if it’s things we do that we don’t like doing, we should always be truthful to ourselves about what we’re doing. Because if we cannot be real to ourselves, then we will not be real in the world. And that’s just the way it is.
That seems to be what your whole purpose is or what you’re all about, trying to teach people that kind of concept or view.
It’s interestiing that you put it that way. I don’t know if I’m trying to teach people that. I’m trying to learn it myself. I try to get on the stage to learn it. But you see, we need to think. We really need to think about what’s going on. We need to use our intelligence in an intelligent way. We’re not being programmed to use our intelligence intelligently.
With Blue Indians, there’s a lot of stuff about cages in the lyrics, and also you were the first at Alcatraz and you’re also going back to Alcatraz on your tour here. Has this been a kinda string for you with imprisonment and isolation?
In a way, because in relationship to what we were speaking about, we’re all prisoners of the shadow world. We’re all prisoners of the misperceived reality. So yeah, the more and more I see “freedom and democracy” manifest itself within this society, the more and more everyday life turns into minimum or medium security custody.
This album seems like a shift for you. You’ve always had that blues in your music, but this seems more like a shift to traditional blues.
There will always be a blues feel or essence to the music that we make and what I do. But the main difference on this album that makes it work a little differently is that we have no bass line and no drum kit on this album. It’s all percussion and guitars, keyboard and vocals. So that gives it a completely different texture.
It seems like it’s probably your most poetic accomplishment so far.
Yeah I agree with that.
I was listening to the last song. That was for Tina?
Yeah.
That was one of the most poignant songs I’ve ever heard.
I wrote the lines way back in 1980, and it wasn’t until we were getting ready to record this album that we found the song that it could really work with. I heard the song behind it, and I thought, this is it. I had wanted to do “You Were” for a long time. I wanted to use it, but I knew that this music was just gonna have to show up, I can’t go looking for it. So when I heard the song, I knew this is it. This is it right here. A man named Kenny Merrick, Jr. sings with The Mystic Lake Drum out of the east coast. He’s the one that made the traditional song. And he taught it to Quiltman. And when Quiltman was singing it one day, as soon as I heard it, I knew.
Now can you tell me about Quiltman? He’s a mystery to me.
He’s a mystery to himself (laughs). Well he’s half Hopi, and he’s from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. That’s his Reservation, Warm Springs. I’ve known Quiltman since way back in the 70’s during the AIM days. And it was around that time he started singing. So about 1981-82, I wanted to take my poetry and put it with traditional native music. I talked to him about it, and neither of us had any experience at this, and he said yeah let’s go for it. We went and talked to Jackson Browne and then Jackson took us into his studio right around Thanksgiving of ’82. We spent a weekend in there and we recorded “Tribal Voice.”
You can’t get those older recordings on album, they’re just on tape, right?
Well, ya know I have a web page, www.johntrudell.com. On that web page, they’ll send you to a homepage which I have on Planet Peace. They sell the cassettes. That’s the only place they are now. Tribal Voice is there and But This Isn’t El Salvador , and the original Graffiti Man cassette. The two of them with Quilt, the Tribal Voice series, and there’s two, Graffiti Man and Heart Jump Bouquet , with Jesse Ed Davis are there. And Fables and Other Realities with Mark Shark. All the cassettes are there.
You seem to have a real empathy and understanding for the female personality and for that force. I’ve even had women comment that Ingmar Bergman and John Trudell are the only artists that understand them. I wondered what if anything made you come around to that kind of awareness and that understanding?
I really don’t know. I think in some way what happened to Tina had something to do with it. In a lot of ways, women have done more for me than I’ve done for them. I don’t want anyone to misunderstand you and think that John Trudell is a really sensitive guy and John Trudell really got it down on how to relate to women. I’ve been down some roads that I’d rather not discuss. But maybe out of all the experience I’ve had, something just made me start trying to understand. These things that I write, I try to write them from the perspective of a human being, but with the gender of a woman. And I never really know how well I’m doing it. Because if I don’t do it well, it can sound contrived. But I really don’t know, ya know. I can’t take any conscious credit for it. It’s just something that happens.
It seems that a lot of your songs are really autobiographical but yet there’s a seed that runs through them that most people can communicate with. I was wondering when you wrote “Bad Dog,” how autobiographical was that song?
Well, I don’t think in terms of percentages and stuff but to some degree every song is a little autobiographical. But I’m not sure about “Bad Dog.” It some ways attitude is 100 percent. But then in other ways, I know that many, many people feel these same frustrations. When I write these things I never really sit down and think in terms of whether it’s my story or not. I think in terms of lines. Lines will show up in my head and I think, “Now what lines do I add to this to keep it consistent?” And that’s kinda how that works.
So what’s the writing process like for you?
When these lines get in my head, I know I have to find more lines to go with it. But I do it one line at a time. Generally when I write a song, I have an idea where I want to go with it, but I don’t know specifically how I’m going to get there. So literally, one line tells me what the next line’s going to be. Then after the song is done, then I realize what it is I was trying to say. Sometimes I’ll start out because I like the song, I got a few lines I like. And that’s the whole point. I got these lines I like, so let’s try to make these lines make sense and have a continuity to them. Sometimes I don’t know what it is I’m trying to say until after the song’s been written. And then other times I know very specifically what it is I want to say, and I work at it. Each one has its own personality, there’s no set rule.
Is the writing a complete spiritual source for you?
I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. But I just know it makes me feel better. What surprises me is people will say to me what they get out of these songs; they get this or they get that or it helped them in some kind of a way. It’s always kind of a surprise to me because everything came out of desperation and confusion, ya know, it came out of all the turmoil. So if there’s a positive effect for people, I’m really glad because it validates what I’m doing in many ways. But again it’s not something I can sit down and say “Well, I set out to do this.” In a way I set out to purge it out of me. Jackson called it “upheaval” one time. And in a way that’s really true. It’s like an upheaval and I’m just purging this stuff. When I first started writing, that’s what it was. Realistically, when I first started it was a therapy. Not that it was a conscious therapy. I knew I had to write, you know, I had to do something. It was either write or kill or do something, and I thought, well writing is better.
And this was in the 70’s?
Yeah, 1979.
And that was when you got out of AIM and politics?
Yeah, I left all that behind. Part of my leaving it was what happened to Tina and the kids. That threw me into a lot of realities that I don’t understand to this day. But the deal was that I knew with this whole political thing I had gone as far as I could go. I couldn’t go any further. You know, because the rage would take over and I didn’t want that.
It really came out in your earlier albums, too, that rage.
Yeah. For me, the way I see things, it’s okay to be angry. Anger is a natural feeling that we have, just like fear, caring, joy, natural parts of our spirituality. So I don’t try to deny those things. But I also know that, say something like anger, can bubble over into madness. Rage, a lot of things that aren’t natural to us. If we don’t understand love, well that can bubble over into obsession, possession and a lot of other things that really don’t have any bearing on our welfare.
And for people like you, the writing and the music is an outlet for those emotions.
That’s right. When I started writing, I didn’t plan on writing. It was never a thought in my mind that I was gonna be doing what I’m doing. But during the times when things were the most desperate for me, I was trying to find a way to hang on, because I needed something to hang onto. Everything had changed so terribly and drastically. And then one day these lines came into my head, and the voice said to write them down and not to stop. That’s why I started writing
Did you ever have doubts about your writing?
No I didn’t have any doubts because I did it for me, I didn’t do it for the world. Even when I started recording and putting it out there, I did all that for me. You know what I’m saying? I did it for me. I don’t mean to be selfish in any kind of way, but that’s reality to me. We all do it for us. Whatever we do, we do it for us. I mean our intentions, our rationalizations, our clarities and our coherencies. They can be whatever they may be, but in the end… Well, I’ll put it this way, I’ll speak for me, I won’t speak for other people. But for me, I did it because I had to.
Do you feel like there was something higher guiding you?
No, I never looked at it in terms of something higher in me, I just looked at this is what stops me from going over the edge. So it might have even been something lower.
I think you’re one of the most honest writers out there.
Well I gotta be real, you know. I have to be real to me, for me. And I’ll be honest about what I express, and what I keep to myself, I’ll be honest about that, too.
Shifting our conversation, I wondered on your thoughts about Native American spirituality. What are whites seeking when they explore American Indian spirituality? What’s the draw?
I think they’re trying to find their own memory. Because remember, everybody on the earth is a descendant of a tribe, even the whites. If you go back far enough in their ancestral history, they come from tribes. But the way technologic civilization works is it erases the memory. The civilizing process is to erase the tribal memory or the ancestral memory. So if you look at most Caucasian people, they don’t even remember their Great Grandparents. Or if they’re the Mormons, they got this lineage thing stashed away somewhere where they can follow them by name all the way back to wherever, but they don’t know anything about them. They don’t know what their spiritual perceptions of reality were. They don’t know their practices, how they lived with the earth. They know none of that, so they have none of that memory. So on one level, you’ve got all these people running around trying to be somebody they’re not, and they’re trying to make a fast buck at it while they’re doing it. But the people who are gullible enough to come to them, they’re trying to find a meaning and that reality we were talking about earlier. They’re tying to find their way back to reality. And the deal is, if they don’t understand what they’re doing, when you enter into praying, or you enter into ceremony and start doing these things what you’re doing is, you are reaching for answers into things you’re not connected with. And when the answer comes back, it’s just gonna end up confusing you more and taking you further and further away from what it is you’re seeking.
But this isn’t something that would be conscious to the person?
No. No it wouldn’t.
Would it end up in just more confusion?
That’s what I think. It’s definitely what I think. Because they don’t get any closer to the answer. But then, it’s like taking heroin. What they do is they sedate themselves and it’s this little fantasy that they’ve found a spiritual relationship to reality when they haven’t. I mean I’ve had people come up to me who have been through this kind of course of newly acquired spirituality and they’ll say to me “You’re too angry, how can you be spiritual?” And I’ll look at them and I’ll say “Well hold it. How can you be spiritual if you just accept what’s going on? You know this earth. And what about all these poor people on this planet that have been wronged, you know, the excessive plundering of the planet, the murder of the trees and water. And you can just sit here and be calm?” It’s cheaper if you just take drugs. And it’s more real, more honest.
What’s the danger with the plastic medicine men, all around?
The biggest danger they present is to themselves, and to the people who place a belief in them. Other than that, I don’t see any danger in it. They’re not dangerous to me. They’re not dangerous to me unless I obsess on them. You see, I figure their disconnection from reality is their problem. So if I get myself all worked up and start making a crusade about them then their problem is my problem. And I try to be careful of that.
Some people say that whites today, they’re really lost and confused and that Christianity has failed in a lot of ways. To what extent can white people attain any kind of Native American spirituality? Or can they?
I don’t know about being able to acquire what we’ll call “Native American spirituality.” But by being honest with themselves, they can get themselves back into a spiritual reality. But they gotta be honest with themselves. You know, and I think most of them aren’t capable of it. I’m not name-calling or trying to start any trouble with it, but I think most of them aren’t capable of it. Because if they seriously want to do this and are serious about it, what the Caucasians need to do, is they need to study their own ancestry. What they need to do is they need to go to the literature and the stories, right, that talk about their lineage when their lineage was still tribal. They need to learn what their tribal ancestry in the beginning what it was all about, and what happened to their tribal ancestry through the passage of time. Then I think this would start to put them more in touch with it. But they want a shortcut, see? They don’t want t know about the past. I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to know, it’s just that they don’t know to want to.
So it’s easier to shell out a few hundred bucks for an illusion, for a Bandaid kinda thing.
Sure. Especially for the last fifty years the TV’s been here and it’s basically programmed “Well hold it, there’s a shortcut to it.” Cause everything you ever see in the movies or on TV, the beginning and the middle and the end, the plot, the drama and everything that happens happens in an hour, two hours. You know, so they want it to happen in a week or two months or a year. But it’s a lifelong learning process.
And it’s land-based too. A lot of people say that’s why a lot of people are seeking that out, too, because they’re here in this land and the spirituality of the land is a different story as well.
Well see, if they understand their spirituality and the land, then they’ll understand the difference between what’s real and what’s phony when it comes to people they go to to give them guidance. If they truly understand it.
A lot of people are calling this white shamanism cultural genocide. After the predator came and took the land, they now seek even further domination by appropriating spiritual practices.
I don’t think they can.
In other words you think it’s just gonna get as far as the illusion.
That’s right. They can’t appropriate the spiritual side, because either you understand it or you don’t. They can’t come in and appropriate it. They can come in and make money. They can hustle it, they can do certain things, but again, that’s still all part of the illusion.
So all they’re dealing in is the illusion and that’s all they’ll ever have?
That’s exactly right. A lot of intellectual and fancy terms can be tossed around about this stuff, but when you just get right down to the basic reality, they cannot take my cultural identity away from me because they’re out there pretending to want to have it or pretending they do have it. That doesn’t take it away from me. It just puts them further and further off into the fantasy.
It would only actually take it away from you if you actually believed they were taking it away.
There you go. Or if I use all my time over here trying to fight them for taking something they can’t take.
So if you have power, it’s a matter of how much power you’ll allow yourself to have and how much you’re going to give away by what you believe.
That’s right. You see and sometimes, when you have these people trying to do this cultural rip-off thing, I would be very careful in how I engage fighting with them because then I am giving them my power. Just by the fact that I’m paying attention to their bullshit. When I could be using my power much more coherently and clearly for things that have substance to them. They can’t steal our spirituality. All they can do is confuse themselves more. And if I’m not careful and I fall into the trap, then they’ll confuse me too.
And that’s happening too?
Yeah it is. See because that’s the thing. And that’s what I have to go back to, and I think it was Sitting Bull that said it to the missionaries. “Your people fight about God. My people, we don’t know how to do this, and we don’t want to learn.” See and that makes a lot of sense to me. So whether it’s a fake shamanism coming up now or whatever it is, I’m not gonna fight about it because Sitting Bull said not to. I’m gonna listen to him.
Right now for American Indians, it seems like a new renaissance and a new time of redefinition.
That’s right.
And it seems like the attitude is changing. It’s turning around where native people are disregarding the white constructs and they’re saying “This is an illusion and we’re not gonna pay any attention to it,” just like you were saying.
Crazy Horse said we’re in the shadow of the real world. So why fight to be a shadow?
What is the cause of this renaissance?
I think it goes back to the politically active days of the 70’s and 60’s and everything that came out of that. I have serious questions in my mind about what we gained in a physical world sense. But what is very real to me is that this was something that re-fired the spirit of the people and made it stronger. That’s where I see the reenergizing or the rejuvenation coming. It was a spiritual rejuvenation that came out of that. I think that’s the most important lasting thing that came out of the 60’s and the 70’s for us as native people.
What do you think it’s gonna mean for the future?
That’s still to be decided. Because when we look at the non-native people here, remember they all came from tribes. And the civilizing process took that memory away from them. So it happened 3000 years ago. Now we’ve been put into that same process, but we’ve been in it for 500 years. So if we can keep our identity, our spiritual identity, if we can keep our identity as human beings, then we’ll be okay. But if we can’t keep that identity, then we’ll go the way of the descendants of the tribes of Europe. The future will be decided by what kind of coherency we pass to the next generation.
Do you think the people born in the 70’s will have the biggest say in what’s gonna happen in the future?
No we’re still the ones. Because what we say to them is what they’re gonna have to use as their basis of reality. So for me, the only thing I advocate at this moment is that we teach our children who they are, they’re human beings. We teach them what that means. So when you look at the human part of this, the bone, flesh and blood, the DNA of the human, the bone, flesh and blood is made up of the metals minerals and liquids of the earth. So we are shapes and forms of the earth. And we have being. That’s the spirit. All of the things of the earth are made up of the same DNA structure. Everything on this earth is made up of the same metals, minerals and liquids of the earth, it’s just that the shape is different. And everything of the earth has the same being that the human has. So that’s who we are. That tells us our connection to power, our relationship to reality is there. So I think that it’s in the next generation’s best interest to understand that. The human being has been given protection, has been given medicine, has been given a means of self-defense, and that gift is intelligence. And so when we remember who we are as human beings then we will know to use our intelligence intelligently. And I think that’s what the next generation really needs to have. It isn’t how much money we leave them or what kind of political system we leave them or any of the rest of that. It’s the knowledge of who they are.
And then that comes right back around to taking responsibility.
That’s exactly right. And anyone — and you can just kinda observe this — anyone who goes around claiming to be the spiritual master, the spiritual teacher, the spiritual anything, anyone who goes around waving that banner about how spiritual they are, see how responsibly they behave. And to cover myself right now. See I know I have a spirit, but I don’t claim [laughs] anything beyond that. I have a spiritual relationship to me [laughs].
I think you’ve been a real inspiration to a lot of young American Indians, and also to a lot of white people.
If that’s a result, I’m truly happy about that.~